Interesting post. I had to leave the Post Office because contention on the back haul from a small exchange was so bad! I moved to Plusnet who had a good introductory offer at the time. I am now with Vodafone FTTC but using a 2nd hand ebay Zyxel VMG8924-B10A router.

Michael,
Thanks for the useful tip on extracting the adsl username/password combination from the zylex router via telnet from /etc/isp0.conf, I thought I would be smart and get this information from the router when it arrived and give it to my trusty draytek. The username was [email protected], co.uk and the password was b333xu (actually something similar) - didnt work!. Plugged in the zylex, and after a while it started working, checked again and they had changed the username password combination in that file over the adsl link! - to a combination very similar to that posted, with a 6 letter username consisting of random numbers and [email protected], plus a 13 character long password also consisting of a random selection of numbers and digits. Wierd. I have had many ISPs over the years, and this behaviour is new to me.
Cheers
Ian

Vodafone do something similar, i.e. when the router first connects it gets sent the connection userid and password. Initially Vodafone (FTTC) would not tell customers these details but they changed their policy which was why I joined them for 18 months. Plusnet then had a good offer and the exchange was reclassified so I moved to their FTTC service.